Identity crisis…nah…just too much to do

Rather than skyping back and forth each other at the NITLE -sponsored Social Software Users Group meeting, I decided to answer Erin’s post (below) about which blog is which.

A thought: why not if this particular blog were about our musings on teaching and learning in the languages, thoughts about teaching, rantings about what works and doesn’t….whilst (whilst?) the .com blog is where our shows are located.

In the meantime…more coffee…

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Barbara is a Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at a small liberal arts college in Maine. Rumor has it this was also her alma mater. She used to work for a small liberal arts college in the cornfields of Ohio for 18 years as a teacher and language center director. Prior to these adventures in higher ed she taught high school Spanish and loved it.
She wishes she had more time in her life to play with her dogs, write, read, swim, do yoga things and watch the Red Sox. Preferably not all at once, although that could be interesting.
To see her online portfolio please click here!

this is going to come out really kludgily; my brain isn’t working well this afternoon. (could it be because i’m exhausted? of course not.) here are the questions i’m wrestling with concerning our blogs:

what is the intended audience for these conversations? that is, what do we hope to accomplish by having them in public?
what would be gained by having a separate place to discuss the trials and tribulations of our daily work? if we’re going to be doing lots of podcasts, it might be helpful to our audience (particularly those who are less technically-inclined) to keep things a little neater on the .com site, so when they come looking for chat logs or podcasts, they don’t have to trudge through the rest of our babble to get there. on the other hand, isn’t the point to try to engage those people with the babble? maybe?

i think we need to continue conversations (both between just us and amongst the world in general) over skype -and- via a blog because the two are suited for very different things. i like to blog when i know it’s going to take me a while to shake up the marbles and form coherent thoughts. but i like to skype when i have many specific questions that have been rattling around and that i’m ready to work through. sometimes skyping is too fast; sometimes blogging is too slow.

re: public and private voices – i still think it’s important to allow everyone to choose for themselves what level of privacy they want for their work. and i may decide to continue maintaining a private blog, although for many reasons that is neither as easy nor as attractive an option as it once was. but when it comes to technology and education, i personally and we as educational technologists can only benefit by joining a larger conversation instead of replicating it (adopting the wheel versus reinventing it).